Writing about thinking about thinking

I recent­ly saw this talk by John Cleese which con­tains a great piece of advice on how to be cre­ative: sit down for an hour and think about some­thing. And I realised that I don’t think much; my time is always filled.

By the way, this is not one of those posts that bemoans infor­ma­tion over­load; the quan­ti­ty of infor­ma­tion I receive is pret­ty high, but that’s my choice, not an inevitable con­se­quence of tech­nol­o­gy.

I don’t think a lot. When I have spare time at home, I work on a project; my oth­er major block of free time, my com­mute, is filled with read­ing. I some­times cycle, which is good for my health but not for cre­ative think­ing time. Occa­sion­al­ly, when I real­ly need to think about some­thing, I choose to take the bus instead of the train, as it takes longer and I find it eas­i­er to get relaxed for think­ing (although this can quick­ly turn to sleepi­ness).

So I need more time to think, and writ­ing more equals think­ing more, so I some­times tweet half-formed thoughts (in amongst the ‘jokes’). But while Twit­ter is good for many things, it’s less so for being able to revise or rephrase a thought. To use an alle­go­ry from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Think­ing Fast and Slow: Twit­ter is Sys­tem 1, for instinc­tive and emo­tion­al thoughts; blog­ging is Sys­tem 2, for more con­sid­ered, log­i­cal thoughts.

I already have anoth­er blog, Bro­ken Links, but that’s where I pre­fer to do tech­ni­cal writ­ing, which is a quite sep­a­rate dis­ci­pline.